


All out of Chances

by EonRunner



Category: The Dragon Prince (Cartoon)
Genre: Angst and Feels, Character Death, Drepressive Episodes, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/F, F/M, M/M, Mind over Love, Mutual Pining, References to Depression, Romance Novel
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-20
Updated: 2020-10-20
Packaged: 2021-03-09 01:21:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,552
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27125791
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EonRunner/pseuds/EonRunner
Summary: Two unlikely individuals cross paths only for a moment before their lives changed drastically. Rayla Serene grew tired of the same surroundings of Xadia and wanted nothing more than to travel the world after high-school. With such luck and her having a scholarship to study abroad; her dream is coming true. Along with Callum Smith who wanted to graduate and got a school for art and design, until fate forced him into a dark chasm that no one would want to go through. Though not immediately, Callum felt himself slipping in to the despair constantly tormenting him. This story will follow the hearts of darkness and light as they experience worlds from two different sides, in some attempt to understand what makes them whole.
Relationships: Callum & Claudia (The Dragon Prince), Callum & Ezran & Rayla (The Dragon Prince), Callum & Ezran (The Dragon Prince), Callum/Rayla (The Dragon Prince), Harrow & Sarai (The Dragon Prince)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 9





	All out of Chances

# Chapter 1

**Given that most** of his natural born life was being a decent-all around average student during his years in school. Callum Smith was as normal in his mind as he was regarding academic prowess. His goal in life was to be a successful artist and designer so that he could give his family their dream home. His father and mother were taking the word workaholics to another level.

Callum kept his friend circle extremely closed off…almost to the point that one could say he didn’t have any friends, aside from his stepbrother Ezran MacArthur. Even though Ezran was his stepfather’s biological son, he felt a desire to be the big brother in his life that he’d always wanted.

Even after his mother had remarried when Callum was still in grade school, he had made it his personal desire to retain his real father’s surname. Luckily, Harrow; the new man in his mother’s life was completely ok with the direction he took. There was no bad blood in the slightest between Callum and his stepfather, but it just wasn’t the same for the now eighteen-year-old about to graduate from Katolis High School.

He’d spent much of his high school life throwing himself into his progression of artistic abilities and even learning graphic and interior design.

The clubs in his school had plenty of ways to express individuals almost to the point that Callum tried out the simply awkward ones. He was apart of Design Club and Artists of Tomorrow Club, nevertheless he did find himself wanting to glide over to the Crochet Club or Italian Meatball Makers Club.

Callum thought to himself, _one more week and he’d be off to Katolis Tech and starting on his dream that he’d created for himself from an extremely young age. With one long, drawn out look around his classroom he saw the same groups of immature individuals skating by on life_. His idea of following the norm was completely different, most people were still preoccupied with first kisses and trying to sleep with someone for the first time in their natural-born lives. Although, Callum understood that some people weren’t slacking and pursued their passions, all he wanted to do was reach for the stars and make his lifelong dreams a reality as well.

Callum often had problems opening up to people, mostly due to his nightmarish childhood experiences. His thoughts were collectively filling up with happy memories with his family but his experiences of holding in his emotions created an imaginary barrier around him that he surmised was the reason he had no friends.

With a simple gesture movement with his hands all his three insanely giant books fell into his book bag and Callum made his way to the classroom door. His imagination was the only thing that kept him grounded. His mind made all the bad moments in his life almost lively…except when they didn’t.

With each passing day, Callum could feel his imagination almost falling apart to keep him sane. Simple moments in his life felt dreary because of this; like standing in the abnormally long line at lunch and waiting for his food because he was too stubborn to wake up early enough to make lunch, along with him walking through the bustling hallways between classes and he gets trampled by everyone taller than him.

His fortress of solidarity was crumbling, and he wanted to break down right then and there, but he had to ‘suck it up’ like anyone who gave him advice said.

That advice stung the most, as if depressive episodes were simply a state of mind that could be dealt with like a scraped knee. Slap a bandage on it and call it a day. 

**Callum was fading in and out** of reality as he weaved delicately through the crowd of freshman and other grades infesting the hallways. His mind was elsewhere whilst his body knew he had to make his way to the auditorium for another session to practice walking across the stage at graduation.

Before he knew it, his bottom was sitting idly on the bleachers and his subconscious caught up with him. He was sitting alone even when there were hundreds of other students participating in the practice. They separated from him like he found a new strain of the bubonic plague.

The stench of the mass of bodies in a broken-down gymnasium made Callum want to hold his breath for the rest of his days, aside from eventual asphyxiation. Sweat and moldy gym clothes wafted through the air constantly pounding his nostrils to the point that even the extremely audible principle couldn’t snap Callum out of this miasmic coffin.

Every passing minute felt an eternity as his desire was to retreat to his wonderful home and close off all but his family in his own world. Callum subconsciously heard the dismissal bell and his body forced itself to head out the front doors of the school towards his house. His mind was elsewhere…again.

The more and more Callum wanted to distance himself from such odd mental safety he had developed for himself since he was a kid. It seemed to plunge him further into the dark recesses of a mind no longer labeled Callum Smith.

Callum pushed his hands into his pockets and pulled out his house keys to open the door for his instant retreat. Yet his mind probed him for a diagnosis about something miniscule to his being.

_My hands are soft…way too soft for a guy…_

That thought gradually sat in his mind even after the door was flung open and Callum threw his keys into an oblong dish by the door where other keys would reside. Almost monotonously, his body trudged up the stairs towards his room and flung his backpack into the corner where it had always been and hurled his shoes under his bed.

Callum fell onto his bed and covered his ears with his hands to flush out the noises. Whenever he received an unwarranted thought into his daily life, blocking out the sounds of everything gave him a moment to be nothing. Nothing was good for Callum.

The thought of his overly soft and tender hands became a distant memory as his hands rose off his ears to re-embrace the world once more. Callum glanced over to his table sitting extremely close to his bed and reached uncomfortably to obtain an old notebook.

This was a memento from his father, his actual dad. Callum loved to draw when he was young, and his father wanted to give him this book for his birthday. His memory of the day was amazing seeing as this book was the most important thing in his miserable life.

But all memories need to end somewhere, and life needed to show its cruel side as it was moments after his father gave Callum the notebook that he died from a heart attack right in front of him. Somewhere in Callum’s mind he wanted to preserve the book like the happy memories he had of his father. So, he decided not to write or draw in it to keep it the same way he received it all those years ago.

The notebook was a piece of his father and aside from the age deteriorating it, it was all Callum’s.

Callum placed it back down on the desk and sat up on his bed to give thought what he wanted to draw for today. He pulled out his sketchbook and flipped past mindless doodles and found an empty page. His hand darted for a pencil and the moment it touched the page, Callum felt longevity inside him. He couldn’t quite describe the feeling it made with him, but he felt like everything he could ever want and do was at his fingertips.

His mind could race all it wanted, make obscene problems for him to worry about. Yet in all of that, his pencil never trembled and always kept moving forward.

“Hey Callum!?” the sound of Ezran’s voice shook Callum out of his trance and he laid down his sketchbook and walked towards the ever so loud sibling.

Ezran was sitting on the couch, well more like he was slouching over the entirety of the couch. His pet lizard Bait was happily running laps on his chest as he lifted his head just enough to meet Callum’s eyes.

“Hey Callum, what’s gunna be for dinner tonite?” Callum noted his awkward tone of trying to incorporate slang into his basic conversations.

Callum walked over to the table that held the bowl for house keys and opened a drawer revealing a plethora of menus for restaurants offering takeout. The moment his hands ruffled the menus, he heard Ezran shift his position on the couch and looked in awe towards his older brother.

“We will order something not too expensive seeing as we should plan to grab Harrow and mom something for when they get back from their business trip.”

His stepfather and mother were out of town on business to oversee an opportunity to expand their personal baking business.

They had left earlier today and were going to be getting home sometime after 9 or 10. Which was fine, due to Callum being old enough to not have a bedtime and being said age to dictate the rules for Ezran.

Callum handed Ezran the phone and his younger brother started babbling about different kinds of food and how they can affect your horoscopes and other junk. If Ezran didn’t order a bunch of deserts, his stomach couldn’t bother to be picky about what to eat.

It always surprised Callum that Ezran was almost the same size as him and he was only 14. Callum was barely knocking 5’6 and Ezran could easily surpass him as every year he’d continue to grow. Ezran was almost average but leaner, constantly wearing dress shirts to show a pristine side to him. However, his large curly hair ruined that image as it was almost like a tumbleweed that was always in the shot of an old western movie. The more Ezran talked, the more Callum wanted to enjoy these small moments…that was wishful thinking.

His mind was starting to falter again as the noises of Ezran happily spouting nonsense seemed to dull to a low buzz. Callum hated this more than anything, he could understand shutting up random bystanders. Why did it have to be Ezran…not his little brother.

He’d always wondered what the state of his face looked like in these times of absence, but he felt his body shaking and soon returned to the world of the living.

“Callum we are getting Thai and that’s final do you hear me?”

Ezran was staring daggers into his elder brother and with a simply nod from Callum, his brother made the call and ordered the food.

**The time seemed to flow by faster** here than at school. Callum was sitting patiently in a chair at the kitchen table. Ezran and himself devoured their food and talked up a storm to pass the time. As it reared its head to 10 p.m., Callum decided to stay awake and await his parent’s return. Ezran said he would join in the endeavor but cracked at the 9:30 mark and crashed in his bed.

Callum sat and stared back and forth at the front door and the time on the microwave illuminating the dimly light kitchen. His mind was growing numb to the lack of sleep he’d dealt with every night due to his…problem.

With every blink the time on the microwave darted forward and so did the intensity of the exhaustion hitting Callum. Even with every fiber in his body saying to stay up, his body failed on him and he could only remember a final blink before it all went pitch black. The times he could sleep was utter bliss for Callum, it was the part of braving the nightmares in daytime that scared him.

Even with all those thoughts circling in his head it seemed that all darkness covering him was only visually as he awoke to the sound of someone trying to break down the door. Callum felt his movement slowed and lacking in stability. He wobbled his way towards the door and lunged forward to get stable footing with the support of the handle on the door.

He turned back towards the kitchen once more to see the time and noticed it was 2:45 in the morning. With that confusion reaching his brain at a snail’s pace, he opened the door and was met with a blinding light of blue and red.

All the lights and only waking up moments ago really hit Callum like a sledgehammer, and he was able to focus on a police officer staring solemnly at him with his hat on his chest.

“Are you Callum MacArthur?” the policeman voiced over Callum’s bleeding eardrums from his disorientating awakening.

“It’s Smith but yes.” His words draped slowly into the conversation mostly trying to understand the implication of police officers being at his house at such a time.

“I’m sorry to inform you, but your parents were in a car accident and collided with an oncoming car and were killed on impact …” The moment those words hit Callum’s ears he felt his mind shut off from the world and he felt his knees buckle and fall to the ground.

He couldn’t quite hear the officer anymore nor the heartbeat in his chest, the news sent him into a shock that everything felt numb. Except for the feeling of tears rushing down his cheeks.

The sound of cheering made little difference to Callum as he stood in his alphabetized spot in line to receive his diploma. His mind was neither here or there as the line moved and his body was inching forward.

It had been a week since he and Ezran had heard the news of their parent’s passing. Both had been particularly struggling in their own way, but Callum was hit the hardest.

Social service came to him the day of the service and told him about having to find Ezran a place to live seeing as Callum had no income coming in or ability to raise his brother.

Luckily, his Aunt Amaya was able to take Ezran in, and even with all of that, the fact that Callum lost his family the moment he was going to start his endless attempt at paying them back for all they’ve done for him. That is what hit him particularly hard and he was one the verge of ending all these senseless dreaming because he had nothing now.

In the deepest parts of his head he could faintly hear the graduates roaring in excitement over graduating and most likely throwing their caps into the air. He felt his body shambling away from the crowds and down a long corridor. Oddly enough he imagined himself escaping the noise of the crowd but could hear it once again approaching him from the front.

The moment he started to regain control over himself he saw a bunch of students rushing out of another auditorium and they wore a deep teal color gown with a crescent moon emblem on it.

Students roared past him and he felt intimidated by the mass of students and attempted to back up to give himself some room before he bumped into someone behind him and was launched forward.

Callum struggled to keep his balance but fell face-first into somebody and they both careened onto the floor.

“I’m so sorry I didn’t mean to knock you over; I wasn’t watching where I was going and…” as he tried to finish his apology Callum heard a beautiful laugh come opposite of him.

“Don’t worry about it, I was expecting life to knock me down after I graduated but not quite this early.”

Callum looked up to the voice and saw a girl…no… a woman with long pearl white hair and amethyst colored eyes laughing her ass off about a terrible joke she just made.

Oddly, enough Callum couldn’t find himself to tear his eyes away from her. He felt his eyes darting to her full lips covered in a daring scarlet lipstick and to her eyes dancing in the eternal fire that was his heart.

He couldn’t see much of her body due to her wearing a gown, but she wore high heels that showed Callum she was funny and able to show the world just how beautiful she could be.

The more he looked at her, the more he scanned her gown clinging to a slender but sexy body that he wanted to understand and draw for his personal records.

He shook his head violently erasing those thoughts out of his head as he never felt that way about someone before and if he did like a girl, he shouldn’t be thinking of ripping her clothes off with his teeth.

“You ok?” the voice projected past Callum’s moment of weakness and he focused on her hand laying out before him to give him a chance to get off the floor.

As he grabbed her hand, Callum felt his body ignite in a fiery blaze and would become a puddle on the floor once more. Luckily, he was able to recover to his feet and noticed another fact about this girl across from him. She was just barely taller than him, which meant without those heels she would be the same height or maybe smaller than Callum.

Callum felt that urge again and rounded his open palm to his face and slapped the shit out of himself for thinking about removing articles of clothing from a person he just met.

The slap was loud enough to alert others nearby and painful enough to make Callum yelp in pain that he didn’t mean to induce.

After he regained his common sense, he remembered there was a normal (not insanely hot) looking woman in front of him and saw him slap the lights out of…himself. Callum looked up toward the woman and saw she was holding in a laugh with all of her might till she started laughing way louder than the slap could ever have been.

Callum felt so embarrassed about the altercation he started that he started to turn away and attempt to squirm out of sight and under a rock somewhere.

That was until he felt a hand grab his shoulder and turn him around, and another hand rested on his other shoulder. Callum was face to face with this mesmerizing person in front of him and she was desperately trying to catch her breath.

She gasped through laughs until she was able to calm down and after a chance to clear her throat, she was able to regain the elegance she had prior to him going full Rocky on himself.

“You are a riot; too bad you didn’t come to my school!” the woman was staring deeply into Callum’s eyes and he felt his mind melting down and his eyes trying to look at anything else.

Unfortunately, she was holding him in place, and she was in every place he looked. His nostrils started flaring up and he could start to smell a beautiful lilac smell emanating from this masterpiece of an individual.

He was going to have an actual meltdown if he continued to remain in this position until he noticed her restarting the conversation.

“I’m Rayla, by the way, I just graduated from Xadia high school as the class of 2017.”

Callum was surprised that she was also graduating the same day as a whole other school, the only part that confused him was that Xadia High was 40 something miles away from Katolis.

“Why are you holding your graduation here in Katolis?” With that comment leaving his lips he saw Rayla bunch her eyebrows like he was the biggest idiot in the world.

“Didn’t your principal tell you that our graduating classes are the smallest in the history of ever, so we’d get both out of the way now, together?”

Callum tried to retrace his thoughts and couldn’t remember anything close to that being mentioned…until he had an epiphany that he may or may not have blanked out on that conversation.

He noticed that her hands were now off his shoulders and one was extended again, and in that instant Callum grabbed her hand and shook it softly…or as firm as he could.

“Callum Smith, graduating class of 2017 for Katolis High.”

In an awkward amount of time Callum let go of her hand and he could’ve sworn he saw her look sad as a group of girls called out to her.

“Oh, well I’ve gotta go Callum Smith, but I hope we can see each other again!” Amazingly with that comment he smiled and watched Rayla disappear into the crowd of Xadian High parents and students.

As much as he wanted to happily tell her he wished the same, he knew it would have been a beautiful lie. So, Callum took the chance to erase her from his mind before falling back to his moment of dullness before he shambled back towards his group of graduates.

**Author's Note:**

> This will be a story that goes alongside my other story, mostly to incorporate new things im trying to soak up from new books in my life. With all that being said, i will be taking the criticism from this story and new ideas from books to improve on my other story to make it my favorite work. 
> 
> Please leave any questions or concerns you have with the story or way im presenting this to you. 
> 
> Thank you so much.


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